How about that! The new paper on the newsstand today looks remarkably like The Sun. And, most significantly, it doesn't resemble the News of the World in the least.

Instead of a kiss 'n' tell story, the Sun on Sunday kicks off with a breed 'n' tell tale in which actress Amanda Holden recounts her "birth ordeal" across five pages.

Her soft focus story sets the tone for the rest of the paper's content. Calculated not to provoke, it runs on through page after page of rather bland material.

But it looks and feels familiar and, for The Sun's 7m-plus regular readers, it will surely be regarded as a comfortable choice. It is recognisably a seventh-day issue of their favourite paper.

There was, however, more than a hint of Take a Break magazine - plus a dollop of Hello! - about the first-person spreads. So we had the dinner lady's daughter boasting of being spoiled, a Liverpool footballer's grandmother telling of her love for her "little black boy", parents revealing their heartbreak over a murdered daughter, and a war widow speaking of her grief.

There are no surprises, no controversies and no investigations. Supposedly billed as a female-friendly paper, it carries a page 3 topless picture with the woman folding her arms across her breasts.

There was Bizarre - in a terrible layout - plus lots of television copy and that dearest of agony aunts, Deidre Sanders, offering advice.

There was, as predicted, lots of sport - 45 pages of the 120-page total (in my original post, for inexplicable reasons, I got this wholly wrong - apologies). As for the columnists, Katie Price (aka Jordan) was predictable while Toby Young, writing about politics, made a fine start.

It will be fun to watch him compete with the Daily Star Sunday's signing of Guido Fawkes - a shrewd move by Richard Desmond's title.

And then, of course, there was the leading article. The Sun says we're here and we're really nice. Honest.

Look at our record - no, not that hacking one, not the one that has led to arrests - look instead at our famous headlines, our investigatory revelations and our agenda-breaking stories.

We've been "a tremendous force for good." True, the hacking and the arrests have been "a sobering experience for our entire industry" (entire industry?)

But remember this: "Over two generations The Sun has forged a bond of trust with you, our readers."

So here's the deal. Our journalists will abide by the Press Complaints Commission's editors' code and the News Corporation standards of business conduct (what's that?)

And, says the leader, "we will hold our journalists to the standards we expect of them.... You will be able to trust our journalists to abide by the values of decency as they gather news."

One sign of the paper's new caution was a change of a page 8 headline between editions. The first, shown here, covered Nelson Mandela's health problems with the headline "Mandely belly". By the final edition it had become "Nelson tum op".

A new Sun, a new leaf is turned, and can it now attract readers? I rather think it will.